1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to virtual commerce and more specifically to creating a virtual shopping area on a computing device.
2. Introduction
With the widespread popularity of the Internet and secure ways to conduct commerce online, consumers purchase goods and services online with increasing frequency. Online commerce differs from traditional brick-and-mortar commerce because consumers can browse to any web address with minimal difficulty. The geographic and spatial distance between businesses does not matter because each business's web presence is literally at the consumer's fingertips. However, consumers are easily overwhelmed by so many options and may not know all the relevant options or even which options are relevant.
Often a consumer does not have a specific merchant or a specific item in mind, but just a category, such as pizza parlor, florist, or toy store. Searching for a category of merchants and making a purchase with one is a cumbersome and mismatched process involving opening a search engine, formulating a query, browsing through the results one by one until a particular result is good enough. Each merchant has a different interface, separate user profiles, different product lines, etc. If the user is not already familiar with a particular merchant, the user is less likely to visit that merchant in an online environment. In a mall, for example, a merchant's store front, décor, music, employees, etc. are an invitation for consumers to enter, browse, and purchase. In other words, merchants can control the environment to some extent to make their store more appealing. Consumers wander through the mall, often for leisure, and browse stores that interest them. Many of the real life aspects of shopping are absent in online commerce. For example, a line of text in a list of search results does attract customers like a store window showing the latest fashions and advertising a sale or a pizza shop with a large picture of a slice of pizza and free samples.
Accordingly, what is needed in the art is an improved way for users to purchase goods and services from merchants on a computing device that captures some of the elements of in-person shopping.